Answer:
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was one of the most sudden and dramatic territorial losses that has occurred to any State in history. Between 1990 and 1992, the Kremlin lost direct control over a third of Soviet territory (most of it had been acquired between 1547 and 1945), which housed around half of the Soviet population at the time of disintegration.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the consequent rupture of economic ties resulted in a severe economic crisis and a catastrophic fall in living standards in the 1990s, both in the former Soviet republics and throughout the Eastern Bloc, even worse than on the occasion of the Great Depression. Even before the Russian financial crisis of 1998, Russia's gross domestic product was half of what it had been in the early 1990s.
